RIOT Science Club

Leadership & research integrity by Nadia Soliman
2020-06-04 12:00 - 13:00 UTC | MS Teams
About the speaker

With a BSc (Hons) Pharmacology (University of Liverpool), Nadia has returned to academia having served in both the regular and reserve of the British Army for over ten years. Since returning she has gained an MSc in Drug Discovery Skills (KCL) and MRes in Cellular and Molecular Biosciences and is in her second year of a PhD at Imperial College London. Her PhD is focused on developing automation technologies to improve the feasibility, efficiency and accuracy of preclinical systematic reviews while addressing neurobiological questions of interest. She has an interest in sharing her military experiences and knowledge of leadership development to engender a more positive research culture.
About the talk

Nadia will share she has learned about leadership and leadership development from the Army. She will then go on to discuss what we value in academia and whether our behaviours are congruent with upholding our values and demonstrate that good leadership is critical to conducting science that is reproducible, interpretable, open and transparent. Lastly, she will ask us to reflect on our roles and responsibilities and our agency to make and influence change.

The new heuristics: Jumping through hoops instead of improving our science by Prof Daniel Lakens
2020-05-28 12:00 - 13:00 | MS Teams
About the talk
Psychological science has been at the forefront of improving research practices. Yet, psychology is also a strongly norm driven field, and we risk replacing old norms with new norms, without increasing true understanding or the ability to justify our actions. I will unsuccessfully try to prevent you from just adopting the New Heuristics of scientific reform.

About the speaker

Professor Daniel Lakens is based at Human-Technology Interaction group at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research focuses on how to design and interpret studies, applied (meta)-statistics, and reward structures in science, as well as having research interests in conceptual thought and meaning. Daniel is noted for his teaching and creation of useful resources. He received the 2017 Leamer-Rosenthal prize for Open Social Science as a Leader in Education, and his course on research methods for young scholars (here) is widely praised and highly subscribed, along with his blog on methods and statistics and practical primers on effect sizes, sequential analysis, and equivalence tests. Recently, Daniel has developed an interest in the importance of (preferably pre-registered) replications and ways to improve how we interpret and design studies. Daniel believes that we can try a little harder to make science as open and robust as possible, and give the tax payer as much value for money as we can, and that science should be a much more collaborative enterprise (see his TEDx talk on this topic here).

Fast-tracked COVID-19 research: our experience by Prof Mitul Mehta & Dr Ndaba Mazibuko
2020-05-21 12:00 - 13:00 | MS Teams
About the speakers
Professor Mitul Mehta
Professor Mitul Mehta graduated from Cambridge University in Natural Sciences, where he also completed his PhD. An MRC Fellowship to train in positron emission tomography at Imperial College was followed by a Wellcome Trust Award to continue his research using magnetic resonance imaging at King’s. His investigations on the dopamine system and human cognitive function earned him the British Association for Psychopharmacology (BAP) young investigator award in 2005. He has subsequently applied his research to assess novel drugs to improve brain function, and studies the role of acquisition and analysis methods in pharmacological imaging. His group have developed pipelines suitable for assaying novel compounds and he has worked with numerous companies in this work. He is currently Head of the Neuropharmacology group in the Department of Neuroimaging, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, Director of the newly formed Centre for Innovative Brain Therapeutics, Deputy lead for Neuroimaging in the NIHR-BRC for Mental Health and Meetings Secretary for the BAP.
Dr Ndaba Mazibuko
Dr Ndaba Mazibuko is a Clinical Research Fellow in Clinical Neuroscience (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience – King’s College London). His work includes clinical trial design and management with respect to pharmacological and neuroimaging studies including a role as a Medical Principal Investigator on a recent academic / industry clinical trial collaboration. He provides clinical oversight for the broad portfolio of the Department of Neuroimaging studies. His work has honed in on drug repurposing translation. He has recently joined the Centre for Innovative Therapeutics (C-FIT) as Repurposing Lead. Prior to clinical academia, he worked as a Neurology and Acute Stroke Registrar at King’s College Hospital and has several years’ experience as a clinician in varied disciplines within the NHS in addition to clinical experience in Australia (where he trained) and also in Africa.
About the talk
During the current pandemic there has been an opportunity to develop research studies rapidly. This is necessarily opportunistic and for studies in patients the government has set up systems of prioritisation. Our experience of setting up two studies highlights some positives in terms of collegiate behaviour and collaboration potential. We also have acute experiences of the negative effects of fast-tracking in the UK. The desire for rapid answers, at least for treatments, has, we believe, created a paradoxical scenario whereby studies that can report rapidly are being delayed or even being denied access to patients. We will also talk about the events that have led to card-carrying brain researchers to spend so much time thinking about respiratory disease.

The generalizability crisis by Dr Tal Yarkoni
2020-05-14 15:00 - 16:00 | MS Teams
About the speaker
Tal Yarkoni a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. His academic work focuses on developing new tools and methods for the analysis of psychology and neuroimaging data. Tal mostly builds open-source software tools and writes methods-y papers about reproducibility, data standards, and best practices. He also has a background in substantive areas of psychology, including personality, executive control, and psycholinguistics.
About the talk
Most theories and hypotheses in psychology are verbal in nature, yet their evaluation overwhelmingly relies on inferential statistical procedures. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the verbal and statistical expressions of a hypothesis being closely aligned—that is, that the two must refer to roughly the same set of hypothetical observations. Here I argue that most inferential statistical tests in psychology fail to meet this basic condition. I demonstrate how foundational assumptions of the “random effects” model used pervasively in psychology impose far stronger constraints on the generalizability of results than most researchers appreciate. Ignoring these constraints dramatically inflates false positive rates and routinely leads researchers to draw sweeping verbal generalizations that lack any meaningful connection to the statistical quantities they are putatively based on. I argue that the routine failure to consider the generalizability of one’s conclusions from a statistical perspective lies at the root of many of psychology’s ongoing problems (e.g., the replication crisis), and conclude with a discussion of several potential avenues for improvement.

Moral overreach and ethical failure in setting psychological research standards by Prof Roger Giner-Sorolla
2020-05-07 12:00 - 13:00 | MS Teams
About the speaker
Professor Roger Giner-Sorolla completed his undergraduate degree at Cornell University and was awarded his PhD in Social Psychology from New York University in 1996. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia and two-year-long contracts, he joined the University of Kent in 2001. He was promoted to Professor in 2013 and has also been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology since 2016. Roger is an advocate of transparency in scientific reporting and has written several articles and editorials in support of improved reporting guidelines and pre-registration. He has taught Master’s statistics and methodology since 2001 at Kent. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and a member of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology.

About the talk

Recent discussions about research methods and reporting reform in psychology have often taken on a moralized tone. I will argue that any appeal to morality needs to be well-informed about the potential contradictions in open and robust standards, showing a number of examples in which simplistic application leads reformers astray. I will also analyse the apparent moral failure to translate decades-old APA policy about ethical results reporting into workable, enforced journal policy, and point to some recent apparent successes. Instead of easy heuristics or unrealistic standards I advocate a focus on actionable changes that maximise the credibility of research.

Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) by Dr Martin Farley
2020-04-30 12:00 - 13:00 | MS Teams
About the speaker
Raised between France and the US, Martin started down the path of becoming a researcher in his university years, taking him to Canada, the US, and the Netherlands. This path was interrupted though when his passion for sustainability led him to become the UK’s (and Europe’s) first full-time sustainable laboratory specialist at the University of Edinburgh. After he moved south to London where he founded Green Lab Associates, while establishing the sustainable labs program at King’s College London (where he was recognized with the Green Gown – Sustainability Professional award). Today he consults for a variety of institutions, whilst regularly speaking and teaching on the topic.
About the talk
In this talk, Martin will go over The Laboratory Efficiency Assessment Framework (LEAF) which contains criteria surrounding improving the sustainability and efficiency of laboratories, as well as calculators which allow users to estimate impacts. LEAF includes content to improve research integrity and is supported by the UK Reproducibility Network. This has been done in recognition that research which is not reproducible is unsustainable (waste of resources and effort) and that good practice steps can improve reproducibility. Universities which participated in LEAF’s pilot include Cambridge, UCL, King’s College London, Imperial, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Swansea, The Crick Institute, Manchester, and more.

Octopus by Dr Alex Freeman
2020-04-23 12:00 - 13:00 | MS Teams
About the speaker
Before joining the Winton Centre in 2016, Alex Freeman had a 16-year career at the BBC, working on series such as Walking with Beasts, Life in the Undergrowth, Bang Goes the Theory, Climate Change by Numbers and as series producer of Trust Me, I’m a Doctor. Her work won a number of awards, from a BAFTA to a AAAS Kavli gold award for science journalism. In addition to developing and making television series, Alex worked with associated content across a whole range of other media – designing websites, games, formal learning resources and social media content – to bring science to the widest possible audience. Now back at the Winton Centre she has a particular interest in helping professionals such as doctors, journalists or legal professionals communicate numbers and uncertainty better, and in whether narrative can be used as a tool to inform but not persuade. She is an advocate of open research practices and the reform of the science publishing system.
About the talk
Alex is going to talk about Octopus – her idea to create a new, dedicated primary research record, designed to incentivise good research practices and improve the scientific process. Instead of the traditional ‘paper’ being both the way to announce or ’sell’ conclusions and the primary record of exact, replicable methods and data, Alex will show how separating the latter into Octopus and breaking down the unit of publication from a paper into smaller publications could change the incentive structure, speed up research and hence revolutionise science. She will also, hopefully, demonstrate it as a working platform for the first time (hot-off-the-press)!

Registered Reports & F1000 by Emma Henderson & Demitra Ellina
2020-04-16 12:00 - 13:30 | MS Teams
About the speakers
Emma Henderson
Emma is studying for her PhD in Psychology at Kingston University. She is interested in the use of heuristics in every day judgements and decisions. She is also interested in psychological methods, meta-science and philosophy of science. Emma is passionate about improving the reliability of scientific research through using and promoting open science practices including pre-registration and open data. She is an Ambassador for the Center for Open Science, a community committee member for Open Thesis.
Demitra Ellina
Demitra Ellina is the Editorial Community Manager at F1000 which she joined in 2017 after working in journal development at Springer Nature. She is a strong advocate of Open Research and engages with the research community to raise awareness of the F1000 publishing platforms.
About the talk
Emma will give a presentation entitled Ten reasons to write a Registered Report (now). Registered Reports (RR), a type of empirical article that is published based on the scientific merit of a preregistered protocol. Specifically, before results are known, and in principle acceptance is given to a prospective study and/or analysis plan following successful peer-review. Providing that the authors closely follow the protocol, the final submitted manuscript is published: regardless of the results. Emma will expand on this description, provide examples, and give an overview of the impact RRs have had since their introduction in 2013 by the journal Cortex.
The talk will be a ~30-minutes pre-recording followed by a live Q & A.
Demitra will give a live 10-minute talk on the wonderful work she does at F1000Research followed by a Q & A. She helps researchers understand Open Science practices and reproducibility at F1000Research, which is the first publisher to integrate the Registered Report format using an open post-publication peer review model (the first RR we published is linked here). Alongside their open data policy, this format helps enhance credibility while reducing researcher bias and supports reproducibility.

Fetishisation of RCTs by Professor David Papineau
2020-04-09 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Professor David Papineau is a British academic philosopher who has worked in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophies of science, mind, and mathematics. He is one of the originators of the teleosemantic theory of mental representation, a solution to the problem of intentionality which derives the intentional content of our beliefs from their biological purpose. In 1990, David joined the Department of Philosophy at King’s College London as Professor of Philosophy of Science.
About the talk
Many medical practitioners view Randomized Controlled Trials as the only good way to establish causal conclusions. Not only is this a methodological mistake, but it fosters the view that the end of greater medical knowledge justifies the means of patient deception. This talk will give examples.

Model selection using information criteria by Prof Daniel Stahl
2020-04-02 12:00 - 13:00 | MS Teams
About the speaker
Prof Daniel Stahl is lead of the precision medicine and statistical learning research group in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics. His main research interest is applying statistical and machine learning methods to identify predictors, mediators and moderators of treatment success and the development of robust risk prediction models.
About the talk
Prof Stahl’s talk will discuss model fitting problems, focusing on ways to select your analytical model using information criteria.

Jasp and Jamovi by Dr Samuel Westwood
2020-03-30 12:00 - 13:00 | MS Teams
About the speaker
Samuel Westwood was awarded his PhD in Neuroscience from Aston University, Birmingham in 2018. He joined King’s College London in 2017 as a post-doctoral research associate in the Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Department and is investigating the effectiveness of combining cognitive training and non-invasive brain stimulation in improving inattention and self-control in boys with ADHD. He founded and co-organised the RIOT Science Club and the King’s Open Research Group Initiative. Sam is also the local lead for the UK Reproducibility Network.
About the talk
Dr Samuel Westwood gives a talk on Jasp and Jamovi, two graphic user interfaces (GUI) for R, which make statistical analyses and data visualisation simple, quick, and open to all. Sam shows us the advantages of these GUIs compared to SPSS and R, while providing useful examples on how to perform several statistical analyses and create graphical data representations.

Big data and mental health by Dr Johnny Downs
2020-03-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
The research of Dr Johnny Downs focuses on combining epidemiological approaches with health informatics to improve outcomes for childhood neurodevelopmental and mental health disorders. His interests lie within several main areas – implementation of patient portals to enhance patient care, natural language processing to refine the data extracted from free-text electronic records, and data-linkages which integrate non-health data into clinical record analyses.
About the talk
Dr Downs will talk about the uses of big data in mental health research.

Meta-analysis in R by Dr Isabel Yorke
2020-02-27 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Dr Isabel Yorke completed her MSc at the SGDP, and was awarded her PhD investigating environmental factors that contribute to additional mental health problems in people with ASD.
About the talk
Dr Yorke will give a basic introduction to key meta-analytic techniques, using the R package Metafor. She will cover organising input data, calculating/converting between effect sizes, applying models to pool effect sizes, producing plots (e.g. forest and funnel plots) and (time permitting) meta-regression, subset analysis, sensitivity analysis and interpreting results from these functions. We will use examples from meta-analyses of correlations and of group differences.
Disclaimer from Dr Yorke: I will be showing you various meta-analytic methods that I am familiar with. I am by no means a meta-analysis or R expert! There are surely alternative, possibly even better, ways of doing the things I will show you – but these are ways that I have found worked for my purposes. Please feel free to ask questions or make suggestions – we can discuss limitations and merits of different methods and I’m sure I will learn from the session too.

Open science for early career researchers by Alexandra Lautarescu
2020-02-25 12:00 - 13:00 | St Thomas’ Hospital, Westminster Bridge Road, London, SE1 7EH, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Alexandra Lautarescu is a PhD student based in the Department of Perinatal Imaging and Health at St Thomas’ Hospital. She earned a BSc(Hons) in Psychology from University of Exeter in 2011, followed by an MPhil in Medical Sciences (Psychiatry) from the University of Cambridge. Her current research focuses on maternal mental health during pregnancy and its relationship with fetal and neonatal brain development, as part of the developing Human Connectome Project. She is a co-founder of the Postdocalypse Podcast and a Graduate Teaching Assistant on the BSc Psychology programme at King’s College London.
About the talk
Alexandra Lautarescu gives a talk on how early career researchers can implement open science practices in their workflow, ensuring that reproducibility and transparency are embedded in the research process.

The unconscious mind by Prof David Shanks
2020-02-20 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
David Shanks is Professor of Psychology and Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Brain Sciences at University College London (UCL), and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Previously he was Head of Psychology at UCL from 2003-17. His research falls across a number of topics in experimental cognitive psychology, including learning, memory, judgment and decision-making, and he is the author (with Newell and Lagnado) of Straight choices: The psychology of decision making (2nd ed., 2015). A number of his early replication studies in the field of ‘social priming’ led to an enduring interest in and contribution to debates about research transparency.
About the talk
Professor Shanks talks about the important role in the reproducibility crisis played by the unchallenged, pervasive and probably false conception of the unconscious mind which dominates much thinking in psychology and neuroscience.

Is there a reproducibility crisis in science? by Dr Samuel Westwood
2020-02-19 12:00 - 13:00 | St Thomas’ Hospital, Westminster Bridge Road, London, SE1 7EH, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Samuel Westwood was awarded his PhD in Neuroscience from Aston University, Birmingham in 2018. He joined King’s College London in 2017 as a post-doctoral research associate in the Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Department and is investigating the effectiveness of combining cognitive training and non-invasive brain stimulation in improving inattention and self-control in boys with ADHD. He founded and co-organised the RIOT Science Club and the King’s Open Research Group Initiative. Sam is also the local lead for the UK Reproducibility Network.
About the talk
Dr Samuel Westwood will give a talk on whether there is a reproducibility crisis in science, focusing on its causes: perverse incentives and questionable research practices.

The 7 plagues of neuroimaging studies by Prof Henning Tiemeier
2020-02-18 12:00 - 13:00 | St Thomas’ Hospital, Westminster Bridge Road, London, SE1 7EH, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Henning Tiemeier is a Professor of Social and Behavioural Science and the Sumner and Esther Feldberg Chair of Maternal and Child Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Prof Tiemeier received both his medical and sociological degree from the University of Bonn, Germany, and his PhD from the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, Netherlands. Henning has published extensively on the aetiology of child developmental problems with a particular focus on prenatal exposures. Most of his research was performed in population-based cohort studies and his work often takes a neurodevelopmental approach. He is a principal investigator of the Generation R Study, a large pre-birth cohort in Rotterdam, that enrolled nearly 10,000 mothers and their children.
About the talk
Prof Tiemeier talks about some of the issues in neuroimaging research.

F1000 by Dr Chris Murawski
2020-02-13 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Dr Chris Murawski is the EMEA Business Development Manager of F1000. F1000 provides a suite of services to support researchers in discovering literature, and in writing and communication of their own work. F1000Prime helps with literature discovery; F1000Workspace makes it easier to write and share articles; F1000Research provides an author-driven approach to the publication of research results in an immediate and transparent way. F1000 also works with funders and research institutions to ensure their grantees can publish the outputs of their funding in more rapid and open ways. Chris will talk about the services and aims of F1000, highlighting the importance of open science, problems with impact factors, finding and managing relevant subject literature and group projects.
About the talk
Dr Chris Murawski is giving a talk on F1000 which provides services for researchers to discover new research, work and collaborate smarter, publish faster and without barriers.

An MRI scanner for one and all by Prof Steven Williams
2020-02-06 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Steven Williams is the Head of Neuroimaging Department and Professor of Imaging Sciences. He has a strong interest in the translation of brain imaging techniques from the bench to the clinic. Steven is the Founder, Director and Head of the Centre for Neuroimaging Sciences based at the Institute of Psychiatry and Maudsley Hospital, King’s College London.
About the talk
The talk will cover recent approaches to MRI scanning the most challenging patient cohorts who are claustrophobic, intolerant to noise, can’t lie still or able to move to the scanner in some of the most challenging environments.

Perverse incentives in diagnosis: neurodevelopmental disorders by Dr Max Davie
2020-01-16 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Max Davie is a consultant community paediatrician, working in Lambeth as part of Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital NHS Trust Community services. He has a special interest in the assessment and diagnosis of neurodevelopmental conditions in school-age children, and in the mental health of paediatric patients more generally. He is past convenor of the Paediatric Mental Health Association, and current mental health officer for the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Max is the Clinical Lead for Information Sharing Matters, a free and digital education programme designed for social and healthcare professionals about information sharing in early years.
About the talk
Dr Max Davie’s talk will focus on how diagnosis is a cornerstone of medical practice but can be misused, deliberately or otherwise.

R Markdown: Make your computer do your work for you by Dr Ewan Carr
2019-12-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Dr Ewan Carr joined King’s College London’s Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics in 2017. Prior to this role, Ewan was based in Epidemiology and Public Health Department at University College London. Ewan holds an MSc in Social Research Methods and Statistics and a PhD in Social Statistics from Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research, University of Manchester. His research interests are in applying novel statistical techniques to longitudinal and routine clinical datasets to better understand heterogeneous treatment effects and to unpick interactions between mental and physical health. Currently, Ewan works on projects related to the Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) theme of Bioinformatics and Statistics. This involves a wide range of analytical methods, including latent variable techniques (CFA, LCA), multilevel modelling, time series SEM, survival analysis, and more recently, machine learning and topological data analysis. He is a keen user of R and Python and has many years of experience with Mplus and Stata. Ewan has taught on a wide range of statistical techniques. At present, he lectures on courses in R, statistical programming, statistical modelling, research methods for multilevel data and support delivery of other modules within the department.
About the talk
R Markdown is one of the most powerful software tools going. Word processing, blogging, powerpoint-style presentations, conferences posters are just a handful of examples of what it can do. Unfortunate, its power and versatility are matched by the calories needed to get to master it. An add-on to R Studio, a workable overlay to R, R Markdown runs on R coding language, and so inherits many of the fiddly, maddening, incomprehensible characteristics of any coding language.

Exploring published research results without the data by Dr Nick Brown
2019-12-05 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Dr Nick Brown was recently awarded his PhD at the University of Groningen, Netherlands for his work investigating social claims from positive psychology. He is, however, better known as a ‘data thug’, detecting anomalies in reported statistics along with Dr James Heathers (check out James’ awesome podcast, Everything Hertz). Drs Brown and Heathers won the SIPS Mission Award for their work on SPRITE, GRIM, and their application in error detection in published research. Dr Brown also keeps a regular blog, where he writes about his exploits in error detection and insightful commentaries on statistical analyses and their pitfalls.
About the talk
A goal of the open science movement is for almost every published empirical articles to be accompanied by the relevant data set and analysis code. However, that outcome is not likely to be achieved in the immediate future (and it does not address the issue of data availability for older work). In the meantime, researchers who wish to critically examine the numerical and statistical results of published articles often have difficulty obtaining the data on which the results are based. The original authors might fail to answer the sharing request or even explicitly refuse to share their data. Perhaps the data no longer exist at all (a fate that will, of course, befall the authors too one day). In this talk, Dr Brown will describe a number of techniques that allow the curious reader to identify possible anomalies in reported statistics without having access to the data, and show how these techniques have been applied to reveal some problems in influential research. Only a minimal level of statistical knowledge is assumed.

Bullied into Bad Science by Dr Stephen Eglen
2019-11-14 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Dr Stephen Eglen is currently a Reader in Computational Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. His undergraduate degree was in Cognitive Science, Psychology and Computer Science (Nottingham), followed by a doctorate in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (Sussex). His research interests focus on understanding the development of the nervous system: How do neurons form connections with each other into structured networks? He works primarily on analyzing and modelling of neuronal activity and development in the visual system. Recent work has applied these techniques to understanding networks derived from human stem cells and for neurotoxicity testing.
About the talk
Dr Stephen Eglen talks about the Bullied into Bad Science campaign, an initiative by early career researchers (ECRs) for ECRs who aim for a fairer, more open and ethical research and publication environment. Founded by behavioural ecologist Dr Corina Logan, the initiative aims to help ECRs who have “felt pressured into taking professional actions that are against your ethics”, and it features a petition in the form of an open letter as well as an 8-point program of actions that institutions could adopt if they want to support their ECRs. You can learn more and sign the petition here.

Wellcome Trust: Incentivising open research by Dr Ben Bleasdale & David Carr
2019-11-14 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the talk
Dr Ben Bleasdale and David Carr talk about various initiatives Wellcome trust are championing, including funding for open research projects and support a culture shift in how we conduct research in a way that will protect individual researchers

Preprints, registered reports & Bayes by Dr Samuel Westwood
2019-11-12 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Samuel Westwood was awarded his PhD in Neuroscience from Aston University, Birmingham in 2018. He joined King’s College London in 2017 as a post-doctoral research associate in the Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Department and is investigating the effectiveness of combining cognitive training and non-invasive brain stimulation in improving inattention and self-control in boys with ADHD. He founded and co-organised the RIOT Science Club and the King’s Open Research Group Initiative. Sam is also the local lead for the UK Reproducibility Network.
About the talk
Dr Samuel Westwood gives us a talk on preprints, registered reports, and Bayesian analysis and how even taking up one of these is an important step in the right direction toward reproducible research.

Equivalence testing for psychological research by Anne Scheel
2019-10-24 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Anne studied psychology at the University of Heidelberg and psychological research methods at the University of Glasgow, and worked in a developmental psychology lab at LMU Munich for two years. Her background is in infant research, but since she first learned about the “replication crisis” in psychology, she devoted more and more time to follow the discussions around ways to make research more transparent and reproducible (“open science”). Eventually this led her to switch tracks and turn to meta-science as her main research focus: In October 2017, she started her PhD in Daniël Lakens’ project “Increasing the reliability and efficiency of psychological science” at TU Eindhoven.
About the talk
Psychological theories typically predict the presence of an effect or relationship, which is commonly tested by setting up a null hypothesis of no effect or relationship and performing a significance test. One problem of this procedure is that researchers rarely specify the size of effects predicted by their theories. Hypotheses tested this way are difficult or impossible to falsify: A non-significant result could always be due to insufficient power and simply mean that an effect is smaller than expected (but not zero). This is why non-significant results merely represent the absence of evidence for an effect, yet they are often misinterpreted as evidence for the absence of an effect.
Equivalence testing can offer a solution to this problem: It allows researchers to test (and reject) the hypothesis that an effect is larger than a “smallest effect size of interest” (SESOI), and conclude that it is too small to care about — e.g., smaller than the effect predicted by a theory, smaller than an effect that would justify the costs for a new intervention, or simply smaller than effects that can meaningfully be studied with the resources a lab has available. The procedure has the added benefit of making hypotheses more falsifiable, because a more precise prediction than “not zero” has to be made.
Equivalence tests are based on a very simple technique (two one-sided tests) and have been used in medicine and biostatistics for several decades. Recently, new software solutions have been developed to make them more accessible to psychological researchers, providing a helpful addition to the frequentist tool kit. This talk will give an introduction to equivalence tests and how to use them in practice, and discuss approaches to defining the smallest effect size of interest for different research questions.

Pre-registered self-replication of data-driven analysis by Dr Alexandra Hendry
2019-10-17 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Dr Alexandra Hendry is a Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Experimental Psychology Department, University of Oxford. Dr Hendry’s research centres on the development of executive functions; those skills that help us control our attention and behaviour in order to achieve goals. She completed her PhD at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London where she investigated the early development of executive functions and attentional control skills in infants with an increased likelihood of developing Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and/or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Her current work focuses on investigating executive functions from infancy into early childhood.
About the talk
Dr Alexandra Hendry gives a talk on the lessons she learned from a pre-registered self-replication of data-driven analysis, using parent-report data on multiple cohorts of infants with and without elevated likelihood of ASD.

Robust research: A practical guide by Dr Verena Heise
2019-09-05 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Dr Verena Heise is based at the University of Oxford and uses advanced neuroimaging techniques, mainly magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), to investigate how genetics and lifestyle measures affect human brain structure and function. She is particularly interested in promoting Open and Reproducible Research and improving research methods to make the results of scientific research more robust. She is involved in several working groups to promote robust research: Reproducible Research Oxford, which is the local node of the UK Reproducibility Network, the Open Neuroimaging working group at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging and the advisory board for Credibility in Neuroscience at the British Neuroscience Association.
About the talk
Dr Heise talks about ways of improving research practice.

Why results from behavioural genetics have replicated by Prof Robert Plomin
2019-07-25 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Robert Plomin is MRC Research Professor in Behavioural Genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London. In 1994 after positions in the US at the University of Colorado and Pennsylvania State University, he came to the Institute to help Professor Sir Michael Rutter launch the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Research Centre. The goal of the Centre is to bring together genetic and environmental strategies to understand individual differences in behavioural development, which characterises his research.
In 1995, Professor Plomin began the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), which has followed 10,000 pairs of UK twins from infancy through early adulthood and has been continuously funded for 25 years as a programme grant from the Medical Research Council. He has published more than 800 papers and is the author of the best-selling textbook in the field as well as a dozen other books. His most recent book is Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (Allen Lane, October 2018; paperback by Penguin, June 2019). Blueprint describes how the DNA revolution is transforming science, society and the way we think about ourselves.
Professor Plomin has been elected the youngest President of the international Behavior Genetics Association and has received lifetime research achievement awards from the major associations related to his field (Behavior Genetics Association, Association of Psychological Science, Society for Research in Child Development, International Society for Intelligence Research), as well as being made Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, British Academy, American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Academy of Medical Sciences (UK).
About the talk
Prof Plomin talks about the replicability of findings in genetics research.

Reproducibility in psychiatric genetics by Prof Gerome Breen
2019-07-18 12:00 - 13:00 | Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), 16 De Crespigny Park, London, London, SE5 8AF, United Kingdom
About the speaker
Prof Gerome Breen is a Psychiatric Geneticist at King’s College London who works on the genetics of affective (mood) disorders, psychosis and eating disorders. One of the most important goals for his research is to discover the biological basis of common psychiatric disorders, which will allow better drug discovery and biomarker studies in mental health. Not only that but they can also be used to improve estimations of response to psychological treatments and to help improve clinical trial approaches. Because someone’s DNA sequence does not change after diagnosis or treatment, genetics is often the best approach for this. Prof Breen is heavily involved in a number of international genetic consortia which are driving the field of psychiatric genetics forward at a faster pace than ever before, with more than 500 variants for common psychiatric disorders recently discovered.
About the talk
Prof Gerome Breen gives a talk on the growing pains psychiatric genetic research has gone through to deal with issues of reproducibility.
